The Cold War Gets Hot

Korean War

On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began when some 75,000 soldiers from the North Korean People’sArmy poured across the 38th parallel, the boundary between the Soviet-backed Democratic People’sRepublic of Korea to the north and the pro-Western Republic of Korea to the south. This invasion wasthe first military action of the Cold War. By July, American troops had entered the war on South Korea’sbehalf. As far as American officials were concerned, it was a war against the forces of internationalcommunism itself. After some early back-and-forth across the 38th parallel, the fighting stalled andcasualties mounted with nothing to show for them. Meanwhile, American officials worked anxiously tofashion some sort of armistice with the North Koreans. The alternative, they feared, would be a widerwar with Russia and China–or even, as some warned, World War III. Finally, in July 1953, the KoreanWar came to an end. In all, some 5 million soldiers and civilians lost their lives during the war. TheKorean peninsula is still divided today.

ContentsThe Two KoreasThe Korean War and the Cold War"No Substitute for Victory"?The Korean War Reaches a StalemateCasualties of the Korean War

The Two Koreas"If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight thisdamnable war," U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893-1971) once said, “the unanimous choicewould have been Korea.” The peninsula had landed in America's lap almost by accident. Since thebeginning of the 20th century, Korea had been a part of the Japanese empire, and after World War II itfell to the Americans and the Soviets to decide what should be done with their enemy's mperialpossessions. In August 1945, two young aides at the State Department divided the Korean peninsula inhalf along the 38th parallel. The Russians occupied the area north of the line and the United Statesoccupied the area to its south.

By the end of the decade, two new states had formed on the peninsula. In the south, the anti-communistdictator Syngman Rhee (1875-1965) enjoyed the reluctant support of the American government; in thenorth, the communist dictator Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) enjoyed the slightly more enthusiastic support ofthe Soviets. Neither dictator was content to remain on his side of the 38th parallel, however, and border

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skirmishes were common. Nearly 10,000 North and South Korean soldiers were killed in battle beforethe war even began.

The Korean War and the Cold WarEven so, the North Korean invasion came as an alarming surprise to American officials. As far as theywere concerned, this was not simply a border dispute between two unstable dictatorships on the otherside of the globe. Instead, many feared it was the first step in a communist campaign to take over theworld. For this reason, nonintervention was not considered an option by many top decision makers. (Infact, in April 1950, a National Security Council report known as NSC-68 had recommended that theUnited States use military force to “contain” communist expansionism anywhere it seemed to beoccurring, “regardless of the intrinsic strategic or economic value of the lands in question.”)

“If we let Korea down,” President Harry Truman (1884-1972) said, “the Soviet[s] will keep right ongoing and swallow up one [place] after another.” The fight on the Korean peninsula was a symbol of theglobal struggle between east and west, good and evil. As the North Korean army pushed into Seoul, theSouth Korean capital, the United States readied its troops for a war against communism itself.

At first, the war was a defensive one–a war to get the communists out of South Korea–and it went badlyfor the Allies. The North Korean army was well-disciplined, well-trained and well-equipped; Rhee’sforces, by contrast, were frightened, confused, and seemed inclined to flee the battlefield at anyprovocation. Also, it was one of the hottest and driest summers on record, and desperately thirstyAmerican soldiers were often forced to drink water from rice paddies that had been fertilized with humanwaste. As a result, dangerous intestinal diseases and other illnesses were a constant threat.

By the end of the summer, President Truman and General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), thecommander in charge of the Asian theater, had decided on a new set of war aims. Now, for the Allies, theKorean War was an offensive one: It was a war to “liberate” the North from the communists.

Initially, this new strategy was a success. An amphibious assault at Inchon pushed the North Koreans outof Seoul and back to their side of the 38th parallel. But as American troops crossed the boundary andheaded north toward the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and Communist China, the Chinesestarted to worry about protecting themselves from what they called “armed aggression against Chineseterritory.” Chinese leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) sent troops to North Korea and warned the UnitedStates to keep away from the Yalu boundary unless it wanted full-scale war

"No Substitute for Victory"?This was something that President Truman and his advisers decidedly did not want: They were sure thatsuch a war would lead to Soviet aggression in Europe, the deployment of atomic weapons and millions ofsenseless deaths. To General MacArthur, however, anything short of this wider war represented“appeasement,” an unacceptable knuckling under to the communists.

As President Truman looked for a way to prevent war with the Chinese, MacArthur did all he could toprovoke it. Finally, in March 1951, he sent a letter to Joseph Martin, a House Republican leader whoshared MacArthur’s support for declaring all-out war on China–and who could be counted upon to leak


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the letter to the press. “There is,” MacArthur wrote, “no substitute for victory” against internationalcommunism.

For Truman, this letter was the last straw. On April 11, the president fired the general for insubordination.

The Korean War Reaches a StalemateIn July 1951, President Truman and his new military commanders started peace talks at Panmunjom.Still, the fighting continued along the 38th parallel as negotiations stalled. Both sides were willing toaccept a ceasefire that maintained the 38th parallel boundary, but they could not agree on whetherprisoners of war should be forcibly “repatriated.” (The Chinese and the North Koreans said yes; theUnited States said no.) Finally, after more than two years of negotiations, the adversaries signed anarmistice on July 27, 1953. The agreement allowed the POWs to stay where they liked; drew a newboundary near the 38th parallel that gave South Korea an extra 1,500 square miles of territory; andcreated a 2-mile-wide “demilitarized zone” that still exists today.

Casualties of the Korean WarThe Korean War was relatively short but exceptionally bloody. Nearly 5 million people died. More thanhalf of these–about 10 percent of Korea’s prewar population–were civilians. (This rate of civiliancasualties was higher than World War II’s and Vietnam’s.) Almost 40,000 Americans died in action inKorea, and more than 100,000 were wounded.

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Korean War

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Cuban Missile CrisisDuring the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaders of the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense, 13-daypolitical and military standoff in October 1962 over the installation of nuclear-armed Soviet missiles onCuba, just 90 miles from U.S. shores. In a TV address on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy(1917-63) notified Americans about the presence of the missiles, explained his decision to enact a navalblockade around Cuba and made it clear the U.S. was prepared to use military force if necessary toneutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this news, many people feared the worldwas on the brink of nuclear war. However, disaster was avoided when the U.S. agreed to Soviet leaderNikita Khrushchev's (1894-1971) offer to remove the Cuban missiles in exchange for the U.S. promisingnot to invade Cuba. Kennedy also secretly agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey.

ContentsDiscovering the MissilesA New Threat to the U.S.Weighing the OptionsShowdown at SeaA Deal Ends the Standoff

Discovering the MissilesAfter seizing power in the Caribbean island nation of Cuba in 1959, leftist revolutionary leader FidelCastro (1926-) aligned himself with the Soviet Union. Under Castro, Cuba grew dependent on theSoviets for military and economic aid. During this time, the U.S. and the Soviets (and their respectiveallies) were engaged in the Cold War (1945-91), an ongoing series of largely political and economicclashes.

The two superpowers plunged into one of their biggest Cold War confrontations after the pilot of anAmerican U-2 spy plane making a high-altitude pass over Cuba on October 14, 1962, photographed aSoviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missile being assembled for installation.

President Kennedy was briefed about the situation on October 16, and he immediately called together agroup of advisors and officials known as the executive committee, or ExCom. For nearly the next twoweeks, the president and his team wrestled with a diplomatic crisis of epic proportions, as did theircounterparts in the Soviet Union.

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A New Threat to the U.S.For the American officials, the urgency of the situation stemmed from the fact that the nuclear-armedCuban missiles were being installed so close to the U.S. mainland--just 90 miles south of Florida. Fromthat launch point, they were capable of quickly reaching targets in the eastern U.S. If allowed to becomeoperational, the missiles would fundamentally alter the complexion of the nuclear rivalry between theU.S. and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which up to that point had been dominated bythe Americans.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had gambled on sending the missiles to Cuba with the specific goal ofincreasing his nation's nuclear strike capability. The Soviets had long felt uneasy about the number ofnuclear weapons that were targeted at them from sites in Western Europe and Turkey, and they saw thedeployment of missiles in Cuba as a way to level the playing field. Another key factor in the Sovietmissile scheme was the hostile relationship between the U.S. and Cuba. The Kennedy administration hadalready launched one attack on the island--the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961--and Castro andKhrushchev saw the missiles as a means of deterring further U.S. aggression.

Weighing the OptionsFrom the outset of the crisis, Kennedy and ExCom determined that the presence of Soviet missiles inCuba was unacceptable. The challenge facing them was to orchestrate their removal without initiating awider conflict--and possibly a nuclear war. In deliberations that stretched on for nearly a week, they cameup with a variety of options, including a bombing attack on the missile sites and a full-scale invasion ofCuba. But Kennedy ultimately decided on a more measured approach. First, he would employ the U.S.Navy to establish a blockade, or quarantine, of the island to prevent the Soviets from deliveringadditional missiles and military equipment. Second, he would deliver an ultimatum that the existingmissiles be removed.

In a television broadcast on October 22, 1962, the president notified Americans about the presence of themissiles, explained his decision to enact the blockade and made it clear that the U.S. was prepared to usemilitary force if necessary to neutralize this perceived threat to national security. Following this publicdeclaration, people around the globe nervously waited for the Soviet response. Some Americans, fearingtheir country was on the brink of nuclear war, hoarded food and gas.

Showdown at SeaA crucial moment in the unfolding crisis arrived on October 24, when Soviet ships bound for Cubaneared the line of U.S. vessels enforcing the blockade. An attempt by the Soviets to breach the blockadewould likely have sparked a military confrontation that could have quickly escalated to a nuclearexchange. But the Soviet ships stopped short of the blockade.

Although the events at sea offered a positive sign that war could be averted, they did nothing to addressthe problem of the missiles already in Cuba. The tense standoff between the superpowers continuedthrough the week, and on October 27, an American reconnaissance plane was shot down over Cuba, anda U.S. invasion force was readied in Florida. (The 35-year-old pilot of the downed plane, Major RudolfAnderson, is considered the sole U.S. combat casualty of the Cuban missile crisis.) "I thought it was the


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last Saturday I would ever see," recalled U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (1916-2009), asquoted by Martin Walker in "The Cold War." A similar sense of doom was felt by other key players onboth sides.

A Deal Ends the StandoffDespite the enormous tension, Soviet and American leaders found a way out of the impasse. During thecrisis, the Americans and Soviets had exchanged letters and other communications, and on October 26,Khrushchev sent a message to Kennedy in which he offered to remove the Cuban missiles in exchangefor a promise by U.S. leaders not to invade Cuba. The following day, the Soviet leader sent a letterproposing that the USSR would dismantle its missiles in Cuba if the Americans removed their missileinstallations in Turkey.

Officially, the Kennedy administration decided to accept the terms of the first message and ignore thesecond Khrushchev letter entirely. Privately, however, American officials also agreed to withdraw theirnation's missiles from Turkey. U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1925-68) personally delivered themessage to the Soviet ambassador in Washington, and on October 28, the crisis drew to a close.

Both the Americans and Soviets were sobered by the Cuban Missile Crisis. The following year, a direct"hot line" communication link was installed between Washington and Moscow to help defuse similarsituations, and the superpowers signed two treaties related to nuclear weapons. The Cold War was farfrom over, though. In fact, another legacy of the crisis was that it convinced the Soviets to increase theirinvestment in an arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S. from Sovietterritory.


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Vietnam WarThe Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any other military conflict in American history, grew out ofthe U.S. government’s Cold War-era policy to prevent the spread of communism at home and abroad.The United States began sending financial aid and military advisors to South Vietnam in the 1950s,hoping to thwart a takeover by the communist North Vietnamese, led by Ho Chi Minh. As troop levelsand casualties escalated throughout the 1960s, the war became increasingly unpopular at home, incitinglarge-scale protests, profoundly affecting popular culture and fomenting mutual distrust between thepublic and its leaders. The United States began withdrawing its troops in 1973, and in 1975 the SouthVietnamese capital of Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces. More than 58,000 American soldiers hadperished.

The Vietnam War, the nation's longest, cost fifty-eight thousand American lives. Only the Civil War andthe two world wars were deadlier for Americans. During the decade of direct U.S. military participationin Vietnam beginning in 1964, the U.S. Treasury spent over $140 billion on the war, enough money tofund urban renewal projects in every major American city. Despite these enormous costs and theiraccompanying public and private trauma for the American people, the United States failed, for the firsttime in its history, to achieve its stated war aims. The goal was to preserve a separate, independent,noncommunist government in South Vietnam, but after April 1975, the communist Democratic Republicof Vietnam (drv) ruled the entire nation.

The initial reasons for U.S. involvement in Vietnam seemed logical and compelling to American leaders.Following its success in World War II, the United States faced the future with a sense of moral rectitudeand material confidence. From Washington's perspective, the principal threat to U.S. security and worldpeace was monolithic, dictatorial communism emanating from the Soviet Union. Any communistanywhere, at home or abroad, was, by definition, an enemy of the United States. Drawing an analogywith the unsuccessful appeasement of fascist dictators before World War II, the Truman administrationbelieved that any sign of communist aggression must be met quickly and forcefully by the United Statesand its allies. This reactive policy was known as containment.

In Vietnam the target of containment was Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh front he had created in 1941.Ho and his chief lieutenants were communists with long-standing connections to the Soviet Union. Theywere also ardent Vietnamese nationalists who fought first to rid their country of the Japanese and then,after 1945, to prevent France from reestablishing its former colonial mastery over Vietnam and the rest ofIndochina. Harry S. Truman and other American leaders, having no sympathy for French colonialism,favored Vietnamese independence. But expanding communist control of Eastern Europe and the triumph

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of the communists in China's civil war made France's war against Ho seem an anticommunist rather thana colonialist effort. When France agreed to a quasi-independent Vietnam under Emperor Bao Dai as analternative to Ho's drv, the United States decided to support the French position.

The American conception of Vietnam as a cold war battleground largely ignored the struggle for socialjustice and national sovereignty occurring within the country. American attention focused primarily onEurope and on Asia beyond Vietnam. Aid to France in Indochina was a quid pro quo for Frenchcooperation with America's plans for the defense of Europe through the North Atlantic TreatyOrganization. After China became a communist state in 1949, the stability of Japan became of paramountimportance to Washington, and Japanese development required access to the markets and raw materialsof Southeast Asia. The outbreak of war in Korea in 1950 served primarily to confirm Washington's beliefthat communist aggression posed a great danger to Asia. And subsequent charges that Truman had "lost"China and had settled for a stalemate in Korea caused succeeding presidents to fear the domestic politicalconsequences if they "lost" Vietnam. This apprehension, an overestimation of American power, and anunderestimation of Vietnamese communist strength locked all administrations from 1950 through the1960s into a firm anticommunist stand in Vietnam.

Because American policymakers failed to appreciate the amount of effort that would be required to exertinfluence on Vietnam's political and social structure, the course of American policy led to a steadyescalation of U.S. involvement. President Dwight D. Eisenhower increased the level of aid to the Frenchbut continued to avoid military intervention, even when the French experienced a devastating defeat atDien Bien Phu in the spring of 1954. Following that battle, an international conference at Geneva,Switzerland, arranged a cease-fire and provided for a North-South partition of Vietnam until electionscould be held. The United States was not a party to the Geneva Agreements and began to foster thecreation of a Vietnamese regime in South Vietnam to rival that of Ho in the North. Eisenhowerenunciated the "domino theory," which held that, if the communists succeeded in controlling Vietnam,they would progressively dominate all of Southeast Asia. With support from Washington, SouthVietnam's autocratic president Ngo Dinh Diem, who deposed Bao Dai in October 1955, resisted holdingan election on the reunification of Vietnam. Despite over $1 billion of U.S. aid between 1955 and 1961,the South Vietnamese economy languished and internal security deteriorated. Nation building was failingin the South, and, in 1960, communist cadres created the National Liberation Front (nlf), or Vietcong asits enemies called it, to challenge the Diem regime.

President John F. Kennedy concurred with his predecessor's domino theory and also believed that thecredibility of U.S. anticommunist commitments around the world was imperiled in 1961. Consequently,by 1963 he had tripled American aid to South Vietnam and expanded the number of military advisersthere from less than seven hundred to more than sixteen thousand. But the Diem government still failedto show economic or political progress. Buddhist priests, spiritual leaders of the majority of Vietnamese,staged dramatic protests, including self-immolation, against the dictatorship of the Catholic Diem. NgoDinh Nhu, Diem's brother, led a brutal suppression of the Buddhist resistance. Finally, after receivingassurances of noninterference from U.S. officials, South Vietnamese military officers conducted a coupthat ended with the murders of Diem and Nhu. Whether these gruesome developments would have ledKennedy to redirect or decrease U.S. involvement in Vietnam is unknown, since Kennedy himself was


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assassinated three weeks later.

Diem's death left a leadership vacuum in South Vietnam, and the survival of the Saigon regime was injeopardy. With a presidential election approaching, Lyndon B. Johnson did not want to be saddled withthe charge of having lost South Vietnam. On the other hand, an expansion of U.S. responsibility for thewar against the Vietcong and North Vietnam would divert resources from Johnson's ambitious andexpensive domestic program, the Great Society. A larger war in Vietnam also raised the risk of a militaryclash with China. Using as a provocation alleged North Vietnamese attacks on U.S. Navy vessels in theGulf of Tonkin in August 1964, Johnson authorized limited bombing raids on North Vietnam and secureda resolution from Congress allowing him to use military forces in Vietnam. These actions helped Johnsonwin the November election, but they did not dissuade the Vietcong from its relentless pressure against theSaigon government.

By July 1965, Johnson faced the choice of being the first president to lose a war or of converting theVietnam War into a massive, U.S.-directed military effort. He chose a middle course that vastly escalatedU.S. involvement but that stopped short of an all-out application of American power. Troop levelsimmediately jumped beyond 300,000, and by 1968 the number exceeded 500,000. Supporting theseground troops was a tremendous air bombardment of North Vietnam that by 1967 surpassed the totaltonnage dropped on Germany, Italy, and Japan in World War II.

Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, pursued an attrition strategy designed toinflict such heavy losses on the enemy that its will to continue would be broken. By late 1967, hisheadquarters was claiming that the crossover point had been reached and that enemy strength was beingdestroyed faster than it could be replenished. But the communists' Tet offensive launched in January1968 quickly extinguished the "light at the end of the tunnel." The Vietcong struck throughout SouthVietnam, including a penetration of the U.S. embassy compound in Saigon. American and SouthVietnamese forces eventually repulsed the offensive and inflicted heavy losses on the Vietcong, but thefighting had exposed the reality that a quick end of the war was not in sight.

Following the Tet offensive, American leaders began a slow and agonizing reduction of U.S.involvement. Johnson limited the bombing, began peace talks with Hanoi and the nlf, and withdrew as acandidate for reelection. His successor, Richard M. Nixon, announced a program of Vietnamization,which basically represented a return to the Eisenhower and Kennedy policies of helping Vietnameseforces fight the war. Nixon gradually reduced U.S. ground troops in Vietnam, but he increased thebombing; the tonnage dropped after 1969 exceeded the already prodigious levels reached by Johnson.Nixon expanded air and ground operations into Cambodia and Laos in attempts to block enemy supplyroutes along Vietnam's borders. He traveled to Moscow and Beijing for talks and sent his aide Henry A.Kissinger to Paris for secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese. In January 1973, the United Statesand North Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Agreement, which provided for the withdrawal of allremaining U.S. forces from Vietnam, the return of U.S. prisoners of war, and a cease-fire. The Americantroops and pows came home, but the war continued. Nixon termed it "peace with honor," since a separategovernment remained in Saigon, but Kissinger acknowledged that the arrangement provided primarilyfor a "decent interval" between U.S. withdrawal and the collapse of the South. In April 1975, North


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Vietnamese troops and tanks converged on Saigon, and the war was over.

Why did the United States lose the war? Some postmortems singled out media criticism of the war andantiwar activism in America as undermining the will of the U.S. government to continue fighting. Otherscited the restrictions placed by civilian politicians on the military's operations or, conversely, blamed U.S.military chiefs for not providing civilian leaders with a sound strategy for victory. These so-called winarguments assume that victory was possible, but they overlook the flawed reasons for U.S. involvementin Vietnam. Washington had sought to contain international communism, but this global strategic concernmasked the reality that the appeal of the communists in Vietnam derived from local economic, social, andhistorical conditions. The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a militarysolution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam servedonly to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S.leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was atotal war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S.concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans,the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe thatthe rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal nationalobjective.

The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers ofappeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet thetest of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power toguarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans ahumbling lesson about the limits of power.

The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the wardemonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congressessentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam alsodestroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, andmany officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent StateUniversity students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans wereoutraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent thefabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation,unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to thedomestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed thebasis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority underFranklin D. Roosevelt.

George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2nd ed. (1986);Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (1983).

DAVID L. ANDERSON


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The Reader's Companion to American History. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty, Editors. Copyright ©1991 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.


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Afghan Warin the history of Afghanistan, the internal conflict (1978–92) between anticommunist Muslim guerrillasand the Afghan communist government (aided in 1979–89 by Soviet troops). More broadly, the term alsoencompasses military activity within Afghanistan since 1992 involving domestic and foreign forces.

The roots of the war lay in the overthrow of the centrist government of President Mohammad Daud Khanin April 1978 by left-wing military officers led by Nur Mohammad Taraki. Power was thereafter sharedby two Marxist-Leninist political groups, the People's (Khalq) Party and the Banner (Parcham) Party,which had earlier emerged from a single organization, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, andhad reunited in an uneasy coalition shortly before the coup. The new government, which had littlepopular support, forged close ties with the Soviet Union, launched ruthless purges of all domesticopposition, and began extensive land and social reforms that were bitterly resented by the devoutlyMuslim and largely anticommunist population. Insurgencies arose against the government among bothtribal and urban groups, and all of these—known collectively as the mujahideen (Arabic: mujahidun,“those who engage in jihad”)—were Islamic in orientation. These uprisings, along with internal fightingand coups within the government between the People's and Banner factions, prompted the Soviets toinvade the country in December 1979, sending in some 30,000 troops and toppling the short-livedpresidency of People's leader Hafizullah Amin. The aim of the Soviet operation was to prop up their newbut faltering client state, now headed by Banner leader Babrak Karmal, but the mujahideen rebelliongrew in response, spreading to all parts of the country. The Soviets initially left the suppression of therebellion to the Afghan army, but the latter was beset by mass desertions and remained largely ineffectivethroughout the war.

The Afghan War quickly settled down into a stalemate, with about 100,000 Soviet troops controlling thecities, larger towns, and major garrisons and the mujahideen moving with relative freedom throughoutthe countryside. Soviet troops tried to crush the insurgency by various tactics, but the guerrillas generallyeluded their attacks. The Soviets then attempted to eliminate the mujahideen's civilian support bybombing and depopulating the rural areas. These tactics sparked a massive flight from the countryside;by 1982 some 2.8 million Afghans had sought asylum in Pakistan, and another 1.5 million had fled toIran. The mujahideen were eventually able to neutralize Soviet air power through the use ofshoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles supplied by the Soviet Union's Cold War adversary, the United States.

The mujahideen were fragmented politically into a handful of independent groups, and their militaryefforts remained uncoordinated throughout the war. The quality of their arms and combat organizationgradually improved, however, owing to experience and to the large quantity of arms and other war

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matériel shipped to the rebels, via Pakistan, by the United States and other countries and by sympatheticMuslims from throughout the world. In addition, an indeterminate number of Muslim volunteers—popularly termed “Afghan-Arabs,” regardless of their ethnicity—traveled from all parts of the world tojoin the opposition.

The war in Afghanistan became a quagmire for what by the late 1980s was a disintegrating Soviet Union.(The Soviets suffered some 15,000 dead and many more injured.) In 1988 the United States, Pakistan,Afghanistan, and the Soviet Union signed an agreement by which the latter would withdraw its troops(completed in 1989), and Afghanistan returned to nonaligned status. In April 1992 various rebel groups,together with newly rebellious government troops, stormed the besieged capital of Kabul and overthrewthe communist president, Mohammad Najibullah, who had succeeded Karmal in 1986.

A transitional government, sponsored by various rebel factions, proclaimed an Islamic republic, butjubilation was short-lived. President Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of the Islamic Society (Jam'iyyat-eEslami), a major mujahideen group, refused to leave office in accordance with the power-sharingarrangement reached by the new government. Other mujahideen groups, particularly the Islamic Party(Hezb-e Eslami), led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, surrounded Kabul and began to barrage the city withartillery and rockets. These attacks continued intermittently over the next several years as the countrysideoutside Kabul slipped into chaos. Partly as a response, the Taliban (Persian: “Students”), a puritanicalIslamic group led by a former mujahideen commander, Mohammad Omar, emerged in the fall of 1994and systematically seized control of the country, occupying Kabul in 1996. The Taliban—augmented byvolunteers from various Islamic extremist groups sheltering in Afghanistan, many of whom wereAfghan-Arab holdovers from the earlier conflict—soon controlled all but a small portion of northernAfghanistan, which was held by a loose coalition of mujahideen forces known as the Northern Alliance.Fighting continued at a stalemate until 2001, when the Taliban refused demands by the U.S. governmentto extradite Saudi Arabian exile Osama bin Laden, the leader of an Islamic extremist group, al-Qa'idah,which had close ties with the Taliban and was accused of having launched terrorist attacks against theUnited States, including a group of devastating strikes on September 11. Subsequently, U.S. specialoperations forces, allied with Northern Alliance fighters, launched a series of military operations inAfghanistan that drove the Taliban from power by early December.

Afghanistan has never conducted a full census, and it is thus difficult to gauge the number of casualtiessuffered in the country since the outbreak of fighting. The best estimates available indicate that some 1.5million Afghanis were killed before 1992—although the number killed during combat and the numberkilled as an indirect result of the conflict remain unclear. The casualty rate after 1992 is even less precise.Many thousands were killed as a direct result of factional fighting; hundreds or thousands of prisonersand civilians were executed by tribal, ethnic, or religious rivals; and a large number of combatants—andsome noncombatants—were killed during the U.S. offensive. Moreover, tens of thousands died ofstarvation or of a variety of diseases, many of which in less-troubled times could have been easilytreated, and hundreds of thousands were killed or injured by the numerous land mines in the country.(Afghanistan was, by the end of the 20th century, one of the most heavily mined countries in the world,and vast quantities of unexploded ordnance littered the countryside.) The number of Afghan refugeesliving abroad fluctuated over the years with the fighting and reached a peak of some six million people in


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the late 1980s.

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Afghan WarAPA StyleAfghan War. (2011). The History Channel website. Retrieved 11:09, May 1, 2011, from http://www.history.com/topics

/afghan-war.

Harvard StyleAfghan War. [Internet]. 2011. The History Channel website. Available from: http://www.history.com/topics/afghan-war


MLA Style“Afghan War.” 2011. The History Channel website. May 1 2011, 11:09 http://www.history.com/topics/afghan-war.

MHRA Style“Afghan War,” The History Channel website, 2011, http://www.history.com/topics/afghan-war [accessed May 1, 2011].

Chicago Style“Afghan War,” The History Channel website, http://www.history.com/topics/afghan-war (accessed May 1, 2011).

CBE/CSE StyleAfghan War [Internet]. The History Channel website; 2011 [cited 2011 May 1] Available from: http://www.history.com

/topics/afghan-war.

Bluebook StyleAfghan War, http://www.history.com/topics/afghan-war (last visited May 1, 2011).

AMA StyleAfghan War. The History Channel website. 2011. Available at: http://www.history.com/topics/afghan-war. Accessed May

1, 2011.




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